


Wee Curios In Their Corners

by Labailey



Category: Horror - Fandom
Genre: Catharsis, Demons, Depressing, Despair, Magic, Original Fiction, Original work - Freeform, Sadness, Short Story, Witchcraft, Wizards, horror story, necromancer - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-18 15:26:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29120421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Labailey/pseuds/Labailey
Summary: An old necromancer creeps silently through his home, hunting something he can't quite identify that hides in his house.





	Wee Curios In Their Corners

WEE CURIOS AND THEIR CORNERS

Thomas was a necromancer for recreation, an architect by disposition, and a thief by trade. 

His cabinets were full of stolen treasures: knicknacks and toys, tin cars, old war medals and crystal balls, soapstone trinkets, pawnshop knives and broken wrenches, hand-sewn ribbons from old Cracker Jack toys. 

He opened a cabinet’s glass door, the image of his heavily-veined hand reflected on mirrored shelving. It hovered over a beautiful old French tape measure, lifted it affectionately, then weighed it in his palm, exploring the form with his thumb. It was small, dense, and pretty in its nineteen-forties charm, with a little bubble level built into the side.

Thomas’ thoughts were as misty as any one of his artificats—but a change in weather sharpened them today. Danger stalked his isolated home, though he couldn’t yet identify it. The skittering sensation made his mind itch. 

What kind of rat, he thought, is creeping in my house? Thomas investigated the tape measure, and watched the secret world he'd built inside. 

The ghost sealed within was an assemblage, constructed from tormented fragments he collected during minor hauntings. Echoes of creatures living & dead, too diluted to retain full personalities. He collected them as raw material, picked through idly, and occassionally reassembled into new beings such as the spirit in the tape measure.

This was a creature molded from memories: the duumvirate spirit of a cat and her kitten, found dead beneath a barn’s foundations; a snatch of ambition in a subway car, left behind by a still-living passerby; the hunger and desperation of tenants in a cold-water flat; and love, siphoned from an old man taking his wife to a public clinic. All recycling through. A tiny universe made expansive through psychological mirroring tricks. Architecturally, it was little different from a goldfish bowl.

He put the tape measure back and inspected his other treasures, like a boxmaker admiring his own mother-of-pearl inlay. Many pieces in his collection were full worlds: illusory vivariums created for his pets, his prisoners, his spirits. Finding nothing worrisome, he closed the cabinet.

Thomas moved uncannily fluid for a bent man. His bare feet padded feline-like over the hallway carpet, imported from Glasgow. The hunt brough out his inner predator. At the end of the hallway, he slowly turned a brass doorknob that opened to a set of oak stairs. They were set intaglio, aligned so flushly into the wall they could have been carved out. He drew the door closed behind him, letting the knob turn itself into the latched position. Then he withdrew an old key from his robe and locked it so no stranger could sneak back out. 

He ascended cautiously up the noisy steps, the settled sounds of old wood, his head narrowly missing a string of light bulbs that dangled from the low ceiling. He moved speedily, stepping on the edge of each stair where they were sturdy, and wouldn’t creak. He followed the stairs up and around in closetlike twists, climbing in eerie silence, until he came to an outward-swinging door in the right wall. The stairs continued turning to the next level, but he took the door instead. It opened to his second-story sunroom. 

He had spent so much time on this large open floor, looking out the bay windows at a ninety degree view of scrubby New Mexico scenery. How long had it been since he relaxed in here? These days he spent most of his time in his attic workshop, high ahead. The view from the sunroom surprised him with a flush of nostalgia, as dust particles floated through rays of sunlight. He looked out the windowed-walls at hill, handle, and flatbrush. Jackrabbits passing between rocks. He was far from his homeland: the mists of timber country. Safely removed from gnarled, slouching trees, and the everwinter expanse of stunted vegetation. New Mexico: his relief. 

The other two hundred and seventy degrees of landscape, in which direction lay his neighbors and nearby town, was closed off by walls. 

Out of sight, out of mind.

He moved toward the sunroom’s only real item of furniture: a Victorian fainting-couch, for reading. The rest of the room was dedicated to art displays and shelving. Knicknacks crammed themselves into every spare nook. Thomas crept around them, peering into his creations one after another. Somewhere in this house, someone was knocking on his secret little worlds. If he tried to divine or scry them, the interloper (interlopers, perhaps?) would sense the magic of it and retreat. So he took full inventory methodically, cabinet after cabinet, bookcase after bookcase.

He opened a lacquered chest to rummage, only to stand up straight and let the lid slam shut as a hideous suspicion burrowed through his neck.

What if the trespasser isn't here… physically?

His house was fortified against irruptive magic by both supernatural and physical means. Everything in its design—the layout, structure, and decor—should have prevented anything insidious. The single most likely way of anyone invading would be to break in with their actual bodies

…And yet...

Out of the corner of his eye, Thomas caught a glimpse of the the miniature greenhouse resting on the Victorian end table. One of his few mundane curios without any magical inhabitants. Just a tiny rockery with mostly moss, assorted greenery, and delicate lighting. 

One of those rocks, he surmised, capped fully as it was by bright green dicranum... if penetrated... could possibly… catoptromancically acting as an entrance... that means, it would link an intruder… to...

His eyes moved from the miniature greenhouse to the rest of the room. There were deliberately no mirrors on this level. He fixated on the bay windows: the wildness beyond. Someone could hide in the hills with binoculars, triangulate the room layout. His mind pirouetted into a paranoid storm. 

If someone can't get a mirror into the room… If I couldn't, I suppose… 

Revelation evaded his fumbling conjecture. An oversight. Some kind of mistake in his defensive plans. He suppressed a sickening wave of unease and worked out this problem.

… no mirrors, but, metaphorically...in the abstract, connected, if, if… build a physical miniature and mirror the room itself, I could indirec—

He turned back to the greenhouse, a spasm of stabbing anxiety warring against his endorphin high.

He didn't know how long he'd left this room abandoned. Seven—perhaps ten—grocery orders since he watered the greenhouse?

What, he thought in the vivid rage of a man betrayed by his own carelessness, kept the plants alive?

Sympathetic magic. Someone else working to maintain their entryway. The pieces all began to click into place. If a hostile entity or person couldn't use a physical mirror on-site as a point of entry, they could still study the layout and use sympathetic magic to link a constructed space to the real space. They could indirectly affect that greenhouse. That was it. Whoever they were, they'd been determined enough to case him thoroughly and root out a weakness.

But to what purpose? It's not magical. It's the only unmagical thing in the room. It's isolated. Where's the next skip, what's the next link in the chain? And where are you going from the greenhouse? What are you trying to do? What's it connected to?

… Me. I built it with my own hands.

An attack?! 

He would have sensed a direct assault, in the same way they could have sensed if he investigated magically. So they must be using me as a way to access something else that I—

A viciously painful snap of realization gutted him.

Now Thomas knew the intruder's location.

He ran to the stairwell door, opening it violently as he ascended to the third level. One foot tumbled after the other, up the stairs, hand scrabbling at the padlock of a fireproof steel door. He ducked into his workroom, crashing into his messy desk and tearing open a drawer. He seized a cigar box and flipped it open, revealing a frosted glass egg nestled among metal junk.

It glowed against his palm as he gently removed it. He peered down at its pale blue core bleeding into milky-warmth edges. Specular light snatched the limits of its sphericality. Thomas looked beyond this, into the microcosm he'd sealed inside—

—and burned with venomous, apoplectic hatred.

Four intelligences were inside the egg. Four. The spirit of two children, an old woman, and some detestable bastard who shouldn't be there. Thomas sensed distress. Questioning. Someone was inside, tormenting the inhabitants after his techniques, his secrets, his real name. He squeezed the weathered glass, so similar to beach glass, hard enough to hurt his bones. Who? Didn't matter.

"Irrelevant," he announced to no one. "Irrelevant, you contemptible tit, parasite, leeching little I've got you, swine, bastard! bastard, BASTARD!"

Some magical burglar had spied on him. Waited until he slept. Ransacked their way into his most intimate space: this frosted egg, hidden away, in a cigar box.

"Oh, I'll have you, oh God, you think you have me?"

With a barbarous sweep of his arm, he scattered tools across his desk, still clutching the frosted glass egg in one hand. Then he backed away and turned to stoop under the door, wheezing cryptically through streams of partial words and curses. Hissed paroxysms of vile spite. Thomas returned the egg and fled into near darkness, navigating the room’s maze perfectly to a dead end, with a pull-down attic door.

He grabbed the pull-cord and the stairs telescoped down. He climbed with abrupt intensity, disappearing into the attic.

It was completely unlike the cozy domestications below. There were no windows and barely any lights. The attic wasn't a place for living, despite his obsessive existence here for the larger part of six months. What little could be seen of the hallway and rooms suggested a construction site, or abandoned dwelling. 

He grabbed for six old bottles—corked but clinking together brightly in his arms—and descended back down to his work room, where he set each bottle on the desk, around the glass egg.

Then he leaned down and picked a screwdriver off the floor, where he'd knocked everything over. He wrapped each bottle with it, repeatedly and sharply.

“Wake up!" he yelled at the Solomon-bottles. "Attend to me!"

The bottles rocked back and forth of their own accord, angrily with force. They knocked against each other loudly, and tipped so far to the sides that it seemed like they'd fall. Yet somehow their bases always came back to the wood, as if magnetically attracted to wherever they sat.

Thomas leaned on one elbow and held up the frosted egg, looking at the bottles as one would address an audience of co-conspirators.

"Smell the interloper! Hear him, taste him! DRIVE HIM OUT, but do no damage to any of my work, do no harm to any but your prey, make no changes to myself, home or possessions, force the invader back to where he came from, hunt him, menace him. With speed! Three among you, kill his extended family one-by one. Three others: prevent him from using magic, interfere with his prayers, prevent all aid. The remaining six: bring misfortune and ruin crashing upon him at all hours of the day until all his family four times removed lies dead, and then kill him! Then, and only then, on your completion of this task in good faith—to the spirit and not merely word of command! Bring about my will in such a way as will please me.”

He dropped the egg, let it roll around the desk, unhunched, and stood to his full height.

"I grant you payment."

The Solomon-bottles stopped rattling.

"Under and within the ten thousand names of Metatron, by the authority of the Chosen People who bound you, beholden to all our Creator, and the authority of knowing your secret names, by the legitimate higher power I distort and implement for my own base purposes, I say that on completion of this task—you are free to roam rampant on this earth, and do whatever evil you will to any but myself, my holdings, or designs."

"With the removal of each cork, I bind you all to this contract! And may the void someday reclaim you all as its lost property, you wretches."

He plucked the cork from each bottle as if he ripped feathers from a dead chicken, with the hollow popping of woody softness pressed by glass, released quickly. There wasn't any movement at first, as if the beings kept within were unnecessarily modest.

Then globules of indistinct matter rose from the bottlenecks in pieces, like oil droplets on water. More and more, shining iridescent in greasy spectrums of color, the shapes attended together in conference and grew into a singular mass. A cursed form molded itself into the wall above the work desk, fed from each bottle, on which multiple sickly shapes appeared in bas-relief.

Six faces grinned down at him, with rainbow-sheened eyes. One emerged as a full body, and with one serpentine rise and twirl of its hand, bowed to him out of the wall gibingly. 

Then the whole great gob flicked down the wall as a quickling shadow, and vanished into the egg.

It was a short battle. Thomas felt the outsider's presence flee before he could even peer into the egg, and felt the demons tunnel after it in pursuit. His furor curdled into obscene satisfaction, followed by anxieties he quieted in short order. Quite a bit of evil to unleash on someone he didn't know. Thomas couldn't unring this bell. And yet.

He dragged the folding chair back in front of the desk, and sat down.

Chin in his hands, he waved his hand over the egg. Reset. The inhabitants' pain and confusion…went away. Whatever the rival sorceror had done to them, never happened. At least as far as they knew. He watched them in the egg, looked and looked, entrancing himself until he reached a disassociated state.

Then his awareness left his body and moved into the egg.

White carpet. Warmth. Love.

Everything shimmered with the haziness of a good dream. An old white-haired woman with glasses, short of hair and short of stature, hale and thin, wearing pale blue trousers and a button-up floral print shirt. A gold watch. She sat on the floor, her back to a couch, watching a three year old boy play with a large doll. Behind her, the seven year-old brother read a book.

The older brother noticed immediately and frowned. Thomas held eye contact with him for a moment, with a impenetrably stoic expression. Then he waved his hand, and the boy seemed to forget his existence.

The old woman registered his presence.

"Hullo," she said. "Do… ah know you?"

Something heavy dropped in Thomas's chest.

"Yes," He said.

"Oh!" she said in a light brogue, "that's right. I remember now."

"Are you okay?" 

"Never better, dear." 

"Grammaw, look. I have," the youngest said, "I have, this."

"Do ye? Show me."

The three year-old bumbled to her.

"Iss Darth Vay durr," said the little one, awkwardly fumbling with the toy. He had the birdlike habit of picking up an object of interest, fiddling with it, turning it over, dropping it, and picking it up again.

"O-o-o-oh," she said, rescuing the Dark Lord of the Sith and uprighting him for her grandson, "This is Darth Vader?"

"Yeah."

"And hweir does Darth Vader levv?"

"He lives, in… the Death Star," The boy's chin tucked into his chest as he struggled both with the doll and undeveloped dexterity.

"Is it nice in the Death Star?"

"No!”

"Oh, no? So you wouldnae want to levv there?”

The boy looked up with an open mouthed, toothy smile of briefly-placated hellion mischief, and waggled his upper body back and forth with the toy swinging.

"Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn-OH!" he giggled.

"Well. Why not?"

"Cuz it's go-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-t…"

"What's it got?"

"It's got..." The boy considered his theoretical position. "DRAGONS," he announced decisively through a hiccoughing laugh.

"There's no dragons on the Death Star!" the older brother complained.

"Yeah there are!"

"NO-there's-NOT!"

"Auwlrite, auwlrite, settle down. No more of that."

Now re-engaged, the older brother noticed Thomas again with sharply suspicous eyes.

"Who are you?" the older brother asked accusingly.  
Thomas smiled faintly.

"Doesn't matter." He paused for too long, and… said, did nothing. His mind blanked.

The smell of baconfat in the oven, and charred yolkiness. Specific pictures on the wall. Photographs, furniture long gone. His eyes grew watery.

"Well. Good that you're all right, " he said. "I need to get back."

"Oh. Well. Would ye like some tea before you go?"

Thomas took to thought for only a moment, but with thunderhead potencies of feeling.

"Thank you," he said, "I'd love some."

***

Hours later, back in the real world, Thomas rubbed the egg with the hem of his shirt. He fixated on its existence as a physical thing instead of its deeper reality as his own soul, with two memory-creatures to keep it company.

As there always was with all of his work, here came the temptation to smash it. Thomas instead put it back in the cigar box, jingling spare coins, bolts, paperclips, and dead lighter.

He sat at his desk, surrounded by his tools, materials, and bottles empty of his diabolical company, identical to the other hundreds he kept in his attic. He sat heartbroken, and mean.


End file.
